Chin Sarin has been removed as Sihanoukville’s governor, according to the Interior Ministry, less than four months after the city’s police chief was sacked amid criticism that he was sleeping on the job as a violent crime wave swept through the seaside tourist hub.

The Court of Appeal on Friday upheld the Phnom Penh Municipal Court’s controversial verdict against seven men—members of an anti-CPP advocacy group that has been labeled a terrorist organization—who were given seven to eight years in jail for plotting to overthrow the government.

A recently cleared field inside the ELC of the Sovannaphum Viniyok Kase-Usahakam company, connected to businessman An Mady, in the Beng Per Wildlife Sanctuary in Preah Vihear province (Zsombor Peter/The Cambodia Daily)

Until recently, Cambodia’s wildlife sanctuaries, conservation areas, protected forests and parks were spared the worst of the country’s rapid deforestation. Now, their forests are falling as fast as anywhere else, and the indigenous communities and endangered species that live there are going with them.

Rights group Adhoc has hit back at accusations from the Bar Association of the Kingdom of Cambodia that it interferes in judicial proceedings involving its lawyers, saying that the group had merely requested that a backlog of case files be moved from the home of one lawyer to its offices.

Yeng Virak, a career human rights activist who recently resigned as head of the Community Legal Education Center, will run for president of the newly formed Grassroots Democracy Party in an election on Sunday, one of the party’s founders said Friday.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has asked the country’s ambassador to Malaysia, Princess Norodom Arunrasmey, to investigate reports that hundreds of Cambodian migrant workers have been jailed in the country’s Selangor state.

Relatives of Thong Sarath, the jailed general accused of masterminding a tycoon’s murder in November, released a video Friday imploring Prime Minister Hun Sen and his wife to help exonerate the wealthy businessman and the bodyguards accused of carrying out the murder.

The lunch rush had begun. In the kitchen, silver cafeteria trays were stacked with small dishes of homemade pickled vegetables, then sent out to a breezy dining area filled with Koreans, Western expatriates and a handful of sunburned tourists who had wandered in after visiting the nearby Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

After growing up in South Central Los Angeles, graduating from college and starting a family, Seak Smith began seeking a better understanding of her heritage, one that extended beyond the horrors of the Pol Pot regime.

The note was concise, just five lines of Khmer script scrawled in gold ink on a leaf of notepad paper. “Final word,” it read. “1: Sell my truck to pay for concrete. 2: Get $1,000 back from Ly Oun at Prey Phdao [market] and pay teacher Chamroeun for the gravel.” The message ended with the word “goodbye.”

Angelina Jolie Pitt was in Phnom Penh on Tuesday to begin work on a Khmer-language film based on bestselling Khmer Rouge survival memoir “First They Killed My Father,” which will be co-produced by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rithy Panh.

Authorities in Phnom Penh on Sunday arrested and released six people dressed in prison uniforms and chained together by their legs for protesting outside the National Assembly against a recently approved law that threatens to muzzle NGOs critical of the government.